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"But even so, that doesn't mean you have to be a nun," she insisted.

"No," I said, "but i was going to say that even if - and it's a big if - marriage does fulfill most women naturally, there's a supernatural part to all of us. Nuns are brides of Christ, aren't they?"

She nodded and glanced down at the ring, shaped like a crucifix on the third finger of her right hand. Her wedding ring. For a while she said nothing, twisting her ring round and round her finger, and for a moment i thought I saw a flicker of pain on her face. Then she looked up and smiled.

"You've thought about it very carefully haven't you, dear?" she said quietly. "Good." There was a pause. Then, "Is there anything else in the world taht you think you might miss? You know, parties, high life, all that." She gestured extravagantly with a wide sweep of her hand as if conjuring up a vista of glittering social occasions. We laughed easily together.

"Not really. When I go to parties often everything seems so empty, so pointless. People caring about their appearance, money, and so on. I mean, once you've seen that God exists, everything else - all these other things seem much less important."

"Yes, I know. It is a waste of time - and energy."

"People get so worked up about all that!"

"Karen." There was warning in her voice. "It's hard, you know. Christ's way is the way of the Cross."

"Of course it's hard," I returned energetically. "It's a challenge!"

She laughed.

{May type more of this section at some stage ...}

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"I want to be a nun."

In the silence that followed, I sat, trembling slightly, feeling sick and excited. I had dreaded telling my parents, but now, for good or ill, the die was cast.

"But why?" asked my mother. The question came out in a bewildered wail.

"I want to give my life to God," I answered shakily. These answers had seemed quite in place in Mother Katherine's study, but here they seemed thin and unreal.

"But you can do that quite as well in the world!" snapped my mother briskly. She had obvioulsy decided on the no-nonsense approach.

"No, you can't," I said, "not really. I mean, honestly, how much time do we all have for God at the moment? Oh I know we're good Catholics and all that. We go to Mass every Sunday, we don't eat meat on Friday, we go to confession twice a month. But that's not enough for me. We fit God into our lives but they're crowded with other things."

"But, there's nothing to stop you from going to Mass every morning if you want to," my mother said. "You often do anyway." My father just sat there, turning his glass round and round.

"But even that's not really enough," I said. "Seeking God has got to be a full-time commitment. A profession, if you like. He's too important for half-measures."

"But why not think about it again after you've been to Oxford?" asked my father miserably. "You'll be a bit older then, you'll have ha da chance to look around a bit and see ..." he trailled off.

"See whether it is convenient for me to enter a convent," I finished for him. "Put the world first and give God second option." I was determined to counter this approach. It seemed so reasonable but was, I felt, quite wrong.

"If you've got a true vocation, it will last a few years," said my mother rather crossly. I could tell she was feeling that she was losing control of me. I had never argued with her before. She was so firm and definite in her views and needed so much to impose them on me so that I should be exactly what she wanted. If I argued with her, such an uncomfortable atmosphere ensude that it just wasn't worth it. She was astonished and hurt, I could tell, by my obstinacy.

"Not necessarily," I said. "You can throw a vocation away, you kow, just like everything else. I might get to like the world too much to want to put God first." I could see that happening. Once I was at Oxford, the world would beckon with all its seductive wiles. I could not imagine what these might be. The world seemed futile and trivial now, but human nature was weak. I could easily persuade myself that the sacrifice I had decided on was not for me. "After all," I added cunningly, "look what happened to Granny."

It was a direct hit. My mother gave a start and looked moodily at the fireplace. My father shifted in his chair, which squeaked uncomfortably.

"But you can't mean to go now," my mother said despairingly. "You're much too young. You're only sixteen."

"No, but I can go next year when I'm seventeen," I replied firmly.

"It's ridiculous," said my mother hotly, "quite ridiculous. A child of seventeen - oh, I know you dont think you're still a child, but you are. Anyway, it's quite out of the question. They'd never accept you as young as that."

"Mother Katherine said they would," I replied, watching them carefully. It was another hit. They both stiffened. They respected Mother Katherine. I knew that. They were also just a tiny bit in awe of her. Whenever my mother protested against school policy, she had been gently and with considerabe charm put firmly in her place. Mother Katherine was the only person I knew who could do that to her.

"You've already talked to her then, have you?" asked my mother. I could tell that she was hurt. "How long have you been thinking about this, then?"

"Oh! Quite a time now." I replied vaguely. It was true. The decision had been quietly growing for years, now that I looked back over my life.

"Why didn't you tell us sooner?" asked my father. "Did you think that we'd be so much against it?" He sounded aggrieved.

"Well, you are against it, aren't you?" I countered.

Impasse. My mother waved her empty glass at my father who, glad of something to do, leaped up and busied himself with the ice; he poured out large measures of gin, I noticed. I felt sorry for them. They seemed out of their depth.

"You don't know what you're doing," my mother said impatiently. "What about all the things you're going to miss - the theatre, books. How the hell do you think you're going to adapt to community life? You haven't even been to boarding school. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. Life in the forces was hell. Endlessly cooped up with other people - all their annoying little habits get on your nerves until you could scream." Her voice had risen now as the objections came tumbling out.

"Look," I said quietly, amazed at my calm. "I'm not saying it's going to be easy. Of course it isn't. Mother Katherine has told me how hard it will be ssometimes. But if it's God's will for me to become a nun, then my whole life will be ruined if I don't. God has a special plan for each of us. You don't want me to mess up my whole life, do you?"

There was another pause. My mother nervously lit a cigarette. My father kept silent. Since the bankruptcy, he had become more and more withdrawn. He had lost confidence in his ability to run his family life. I knew how much I was hurting them both, but there was no going back now.

"After all," I said again into the dead silence, "you do believe in God, don't you? You believe that the religious life is the highest human vocation. Well then, how can you possibly refuse to allow me to enter?"

I could almost hear my parents' thoughts crackling through the room. I could feel them struggling with the dilemma they were in.

"Of course we believe that," My mother stubbed out her cigarette. Her voice was quieter now. "But that doesn't mean we can believe you are ready to take such a big step. I still think," her voice rang out confidently now - once she took her mind off the disturbing thought of God and his will, I noticed wryly, she became much more sure of herself, but God was the whole point; He couldn't just be ignored - "I still think," she repeated, "that you are much too young. You don't know anything about the world that you are going to give up. Don't you think so, John?""

"Absolutely, dear, absolutely," muttered my father gloomily. He was looking at me with astonishment. "Do you really want to give us up?" he asked, his voice trembling slightly. "Don't you see how much we'll miss you?"

I sat there, fighting a lump in my throat. I could barely trust myself to speak. Don't let them turn on the emotion, I prayed silently. I can't cope with that.

"Of course I'll miss you," I said huskily.

Once again we sat in silence. The cars on the main road outside swept by with a carefree swishing sound. I wanted this to be over. But I knew too that while I was at home it would never be over. The convent was there now, splitting the bond between us. Things would never be the same again.

"Look," I said, "it's pointless to go on like this. I'll never be able to convince you. To you I'm just a little girl. I always will be, as far as you're concerned, even when I'm" - I paused, searching frantically for an age of suitable antiquity - "thirty! Why don't you go and see Mother Katherine. She told me that she'd be very willing to talk with you about it. After all, she's the professional. You know about life and the world. But she knows about life and the world and the convent. She's known me ever since I was five - almost as long as you have. Why don't you go and see her?"

"And if she doesn't make us change our minds? Then will you promise to go to college before you think about becoming a nun?" asked my mother quickly. She was already setting her shoulders squarely, ready to do battle.

I had every confidence in Mother Katherine. "Yes, I promise."

From odd things my parents said after their momentous interview with Mother Katherine, I could imagine exactly what had happened.

...

"But Karen's just not mature enough to make such a huge decision," my mother continued. "She's never known anything else. How can she make a proper choice? And she's very emotional, you know, very intense."

Mother Katherine smiled calmly. "Of course emotion has to be kept in control. But if Karen weren't as sensitive as she is, all her gifts for poetry and art wouldn't exist. She'd be a different person. And a poorer one. And I think she is far more mature than you realise. Of course you will always see her as a little girl," she laughed kindly. "How can you help that? It's very, very difficult for parents to see their children objectively."

As she said that, my parents began to feel quite helpless. Mother Katherine always managed to make them feel like children themselves. Those pale blue eyes of hers looked right through you and seemed to spot all your weak points, things that other people didn't notice. Now she claimed to understand their own daughter better than they did. And how could they argue? Of course they were biassed; they were bound to be.

"Now look," Mother Katherine took a fresh tack, "do you agree that the fundamental question here is not whether you or I want Karen to become a nun next year, but whether God wants it? We've all got to empty ourselves of our own limited, human responses. It's what God wants that matters."

And with the mention of God the whole thing became much more frighteneing. After all, if you believed in God, then of course a religious vocation was a wonderful thing. It must have made them wonder, in a sudden guilty moment, whether they were selfishly opposing God's will. Who could tell? Once God came into it, the solid ground of common sense started crumbling away under you.

"But how can we tell what God's will is?"

And then Mother Katherine gave them the acid test of a vocation, as defined by the church, a defintion I was to hear many times.

"There is only one way of being absolutely sure whether a girl has a true vocation. She has to be accepted by the religious order she wants to join; that is the only criterion that the church accepts as proof. Feelings, prayers, thoughts, ideals - none o f these counts for anything beside that. If the Provinical Superior at Tripton accepts Karen, then her decision has the force of the whole church behind it. And the church, we know, is empowered by Christ."

"But let's face it, Mother," my father said ironically, "you don't turn people away. You must need new recruits."

"Indeed, Mr Armstrong, we do turn people away," was the rather tart rejoinder. "Look at it this way. Somebody without a true vocation would only be a disruptive influence and eventually undermine the order. We have to be very, very careful whom we admit."

"But what if - I know you won't admit this - but if," my mother pleaded, "a mistake is made, surely that's possible. Then at seventeen Karen's whole life will be ruined."

"Not at all," Mother Katherine retorted. "Of course we do admit people into the Order who find later that they haven't got a vocation. But you know, Mrs Armstrong, I'd hesitate to call that a mistake. If they were accepted by the Order, then God, in his infinite wisdom, called them there for His own special purposes. And this may happen to Karen. She may find after a while that it isn't God's will and she will be free to go, or we shall be free to send her home. Yes, Mrs Armstrong, we do send people home," she laughed, "at any time during the first three years."

Sadly my parents, faced with these cosmic immensities and Divine purposes, realised that their own feelings really didn't count for much. Helplessly, they felt themselves carried along by the force of Mother Katherine's certainty.

"Believe me, Mrs Armstrong," Mother Katherine was saying, "if Karen has no vocation she couldn't stay. It's a very careful training, you know. She will be trained as a potulant and novice by people who really know how to look into a girl's heart. There is no way she could bear to stay if it weren't God's will. All the other reasons for entering get refined in the noviceship. The only reason for staying is that God wants it."

"And she can leave at any time during the first three years?" my father asked.

"Any time before first vows."

"I suppose," said my mother, voicing for the first time the reason she would use again and again to comfort herself, "that if we stop her now and insist she go to college, she'll spend the whole time pining for the convent and never really entering into anything properly."

"Yes," said Mother Katherine, "she'd just be marking time."

"Whereas if she goes next year and then leaves, she will have gotten it out of her system sooner," capped my father.

"Exactly, Mr Armstrong, but don't bank on that. I think she has a true vocation - thank God - and I don't think she will leave. I must tell you that. And believe me, if Karen doesn't do the will of God, she can never be happy. God makes each of us for a special purpose. If we choose to thwart that purpose, our lives are useless."

My parents must have thought then of my grandmother. Was that where it had all gone wrong for her? Perhaps she was right. Perhaps she should have been a nun.

"Mr Armstrong, Mrs Armstrong, will you give her to God?"

I had been waiting nervously on the stairs for them when I heard the key in the lock. It was a moment that was to decide my whole life. As soon as I saw their faces, I knew.

"Well?"

They looked so tired.

"You can go, if you really want to."

"Oh! Thank you!" How inadequate to say it, to embrace them. And how inadequate as the expresion of the joy that suddenly filled me. There was nothing to stop me now. The road stretched clearly ahead to God.

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In the second year, the seclusion is relaxed a little. The second year novice is permitted to study theology, scripture, and church history. Like the postulants, she can be employed outside the Noviceship in the convent refectory and sacristy. If she is a qualified teacher she may sometimes be allowed to do a little teaching in the school. But always the emphasis is on this stripping and breaking down of her selfhood.

Any novice who is going to be a good nun will have a terrible time in the noviceship. In fact, we were told that if we were not finding it unbearably hard then that was a pretty good indication that we weren't trying hard enough. But no two novices will have an identical experience. For each one the things that need breaking down will be different. The most difficult thing is to come to terms with yourself. I had never fully realised how much the world outside the convent shields the individual from ever having to endure any great degree of unpleasant self-knowledge. We are expected to be social animals and to seek company; most of us have to work with other people. There is marriage, where one's partner can try to build up an ego that is in danger of crumbling. In the twentieth century, there are any number of easy ways to escape from yourself - television, cinema, endless noise on the radio, rush, bustle, socialising. In the convent, there are just acres of time with yourself and God.

I had never had a particularly high opinion of myself. I knew that I had faults, but they didn't seem much worse than anyone else's. I had a reasonable number of talents - nothing very spectacular - to counterbalance the things I couldn't do. Nothing in my past life had prepared me for this intensely intimate knowledge of myself. However hard I tried to keep the rule, however hard I tried to pray; to practice humility, charity, and the rest of it, however hard I tried to change myself, I failed. Intimate, petty little failures. My meditation became an hour of messy, self-indulgent fantasy; the silent times of recollection were filled with trivial self-pitying thoughts. Whenever i tried to be particularly kind or humble I'd find my thoughts seething proudly. When I tried, as I had to try, not to need people's love and affection anymore, I found myself yearning for it. And feeling so disgustingly sorry for myself. It all seemed so simple when you read the rule. It finished with a quote from Isaiah: "This is the way; walk ye in it." As easy as that. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't change myself. Oh yes, I could conform outwardly and make a pretty good job of that, but inwardly I remained the same: worldly and full of self. Theologians tell us that Hell is not the popular vision of a pit filled with fire. It is far more terrible than that. It is the endurance of oneself forever and ever with no alleviation at all. It is logical. You've chosen yourself instead of God, so God gives you yourself. But this time without anything or anyone to distract you. Just you on your own.

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Afterword

1980

Yesterday I met a friend for lunch. She used to be Sister Rebecca but she left the Order a year or two after I did. I wathced her weave her way through the aggressive traffic on Regent Street, perched upright on her bicycle, looking just as she used to look cycling round Oxford in her habit, her back straight and her face a severe mask of concentration. We greeted one another enthusiastically while she parked her bike, unclipping her floating Indian skirt, which she had secured with a massive paper clip.

"I can't find anything else to use," she said when she saw me laughing. "What did we do in the convent?"

"We used to tuck our skirts up."

"Yes, and wobble on an uncomfortable bustle!"

We smiled at the shared memory. We're always glad to see each other.

"It's such a relief to talk to someoene who really understands what it was like. I can't talk to anyone else about it at all."

"Do you find that people think it is bad for you to dwell on it and change the subject quickly?" That had so often been my experience.

"No, not really. I find that I just can't bear to tell anyone that I was a nun once. Whenever I pass a nun in the street - even one of those dowdy modern ones - I feel they must know and reproach me. I hurry past without even looking at them. And you know what it's like. People ask, 'What did you do before your present job? ... and before that? ... and before that?' I sit there dreading the moment when I have to tell them, or go vague."

I did know what it was like. Unlike Rebecca, I have made a point of telling people I was a nun if those questions are asked. Then I sit back waiting for the reaction, the double-take - "You don't look like a nun!" No, I don't now. Why should I? Or else their eyes glaze as at something distasteful, and they say, "Well I'm sure you're glad that that's all over," and change the subject. Or worse, there's the "Tell us all the gory details" approach. However hard I try, I've never been able to explain the most important part of my life, not even to the people who've been closest to me. That's why I value Rebecca. Only she really appreciates the huge task we have both got: to come to terms with those years in the convent and somehow ensure that our lives in the world keep in touch with the nuns we were and still are. We both have found very different ways of coping with the outside world, but at least we understand the nature of the struggle.

When Rebecca and I had collected our lunch, I told her that I had written this book. I was a bit apprehensive about her reaction. After all, she's in the book.

She looked at me silently for a while and then slowly a smile spread over her face. "How amazing," she said at first. Then her face became thoughtful. "It's time," she asaid, "How brave of you."

Again I knew what she meant. To confront those years is painful because they never die. People seem to assume that the experience is over now and that its only relevance to my life today is a fund of funny stories to tell at dinner parties. But the insight I'd had when I left the Order - that in some sense I'd always be a nun - has proved to be right. Yet I agreed with Rebecca when she said that she'd never doubted that her decision to leave was the right one. "It's the one thing I've never regretted," she said, "Heaven knows, life hasn't been a bed of roses since, but the thought of going back has never crossed my mind."

"Sometimes," I said, "when it was very hard and so lonely, I used to look back and long for someone to advise me. We had the rule and superiors to teach us how to become nuns, but nothing and nobody to help us to stop. But I knew I couldn't go back, even though they once told me I could if I wanted to."

I also find now that I can't regret that earlier decision to become a nun. Although I was ridiculously young, there was nothing unusual then in entering the Order at seventeen. But after I left they decided that no girl should enter until she had had at least three year's experience in the world after leaving school. I've tried to write about the dawning of my vocation as it appeared to me at the time, but now I see that mixed up with all the idealism, I was escaping from a world I felt unable to cope with. In a sense, when i decided to become a nun, I was "dropping out" in the way dictated by my Catholic background. I'd never heard of a 'drop out', of course, but such ideas must have been in the air at the time even in a convent school in Birmingham.

It's all very different now. The Order was transformed by the decrees of the Second Vatican Council. The nuns have discarded the habit completely, the rule of silence has been relaxed, the old rituals and customs have gone. The novices are no longer secluded from the world, nor are those trials and disciplines manufactured for them. They live in London in a lively community and are always going out and about. There's no more chapter of faults, public penance, processions down draughty cloisters, medieval underwear, austere dormitories. Nuns live in cheerful bedrooms that they decorate themselves and can invite visitors in to see them and drink coffee.

Would it have made a difference in my final decision to leave if it had been like that when I entered? I don't think so. I would probably have joined one of the stricter contemlative Orders. It's years since I've visited a convent, but on my last visit I felt disappointed and ambivalent about what I saw. It seemed that the old rituals and austerities supported the religious life with a dignity that it no longer has. Certainly there had to be changes, and the nuns would argue that nothing esesential has gone. But a support system must be found to uphold the one thing that can never be changed: a nun's life is nonsense unless she is prepared to give up every bit of herself. At least the strict observances of the old days made it very clear to me what that meant.

On the day I left I knew that things were going to be lonely and difficult, but I had no idea how truly terrible the period of adjustment was going to be. For over six years I had to force myself into the world I'd abandoned so thoroughly. In the Easter of my first year in the noviceship, I remember, someone recorded us singing the chant during the easter vigil. Mother Walter played it to us one evening at recreation, and I listened puzzled to our voices, pure and confident as choir boys' soaring in serene praise. "Mother," I said while she turned over the tape, "we don't sound at all like women We sound like ..." I trailed off; I didn't have the words: sexless, prepubescent, without passion. Mother Walter looked bewildered and waved my comment away as an irrelevance, but for the rest of the evening I remember looking around the table at my fellow novices. I knew how often each one cried herself to sleep in the crowded dormitory upstairs (there was usually someone sobbing at night), and from the endless public reprimands I knew how, in our private muddles and complexities, we were miles from that pure, happy sound issuing from the tape recorder. Nevertheless we had produced it; it couldn't all be a lie. A struggling group of young women produced that joyful, eunuch-like singing. All passion spent. Somewhere we were loving, sexual beings, full of depression and struggle, but we looked as peaceful as angels. "My peace is not the peace that the world gives," Christ had said, and I'd found that that was true. I rarely felt at peace, often felt very miserable indeed, but at another (deeper?) level I was happy because I knew I was where I wanted to be.

"But, what a waste," people so often exclaim. "Seven years! Such crucial years. Your youth squandered unnaturally!" A few years ago I would have agreed with them. But now I can honestly say that I wouldn't have missed the experience. At least for once in my life I tried to live absolutely and single-mindedly.

The ideal of the religious life is still, I think, a beautiful one. But only a few of those who undertake it are capable of it. My most crucial mistake was the overvaluing of the will. Rebecca and I were both ill in the Order, but such was its strength of belief in the sovereignty of will power that it never occured to the nuns until too late that we ought to see a doctor. How lovely it would be if the will really were supreme; if the mass of emotion, bodily impulses, and disorders and the murky subconscious could all be controlled by a strong act of will. In the Order I discovered that we are complex beings, mind, heart, soul and body engaged in a continuous bloody battle. Indeed, one of the most important things I learnt from religious life was the relative impotence of the will. It's a good, though humbling, thing to realise. It brings a kind of peace with it.

I'm a better nun now than I ever was in the Cloister. You can be so fearful of loving other people more than God that you can be downright uncharitable. Surely it's better to love others, however how messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden. Ironically, I now see in myself qualities of detachment and self-sufficency that are so like those I was struggling to acquire while I was a nun. The sad thing is I no longer value these qualities as I did: they can so easily become hardness and complacency.

The nuns I lived with were women of charity and integrity. They were striving for a superhuman ideal and not surprisingly they made mistakes. They did their best for me but between us we failed. Religious life is about love and love is about risk. Perhaps none of us risked enough.

Last Updated: April 19, 2001

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